The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?

"So, this is in some ways different to the other books I’ve picked in that it is a political case like All The President’s Men but it actually does involve a murder. It’s set in Guatemala at a time when there was great repression from the military regime and dissidents were hunted down and killed. These were really genocidal crimes. One of the most infamous killings was of Bishop Juan Gerardi, who had spoken out against the regime and in defence of the victims. He helped publish a report that helped to detail many of the genocidal killings of the regime. And so, he was targeted and killed—shot. What makes this such a powerful book is how Goldman tries to peel back the hidden layers of the conspiracy behind the murder. Goldman also looks at the way we make sense of crimes, how we get at the truth and how we process it. That’s how, in some ways, we’re able to live with the crimes—but that doesn’t mean we have closure or anything so simple. The whole construction of these detective stories and true crime stories is that there is a crime, there is an investigator, the investigator pieces together elements of the truth and helps, at least, to make sense of the chaos we live in. “The notion that the legal institutions that are supposed to expose the truth are instead covering it up or manipulating it adds a real terror” Goldman’s case shows how, when there is a political killing, when there is a criminal power structure involved, you can corrupt the organs of justice and subvert any sense of truth. It creates an added nefariousness to the crimes themselves. That is certainly the case here. And so, the context of this crime is different from the context of some of the other crimes we’ve talked about. It’s backdrop is a system of fragile institutions where corruption is widespread. The notion that the legal institutions that are supposed to expose the truth are instead distorting it, covering it up or manipulating it, adds a real terror. The murkiness of the case, the knottiness of it, is extreme; Goldman lets you get a sense of what it’s like to be in a sea of these counter-narratives with everyone spinning a different version in order to cover up the real truth. And he tries to sort through it all. The book ends up being about so much more than a singular killing. Yes. The Art of Political Murder is that rare title that is perfect—it really reflects what it is. There is such a sinister art to it. It takes you back to Machiavelli. But, in fact, I think it also gets at why we’re so drawn to detectives in popular culture: they provide this kind of—I don’t want to oversell it but— psychological role for us. They can bring justice or at least some meaning or sense to senselessness. But if that is corrupted and the people doing the ordering are themselves actually creating a fake order—creating a tissue of lies, an illusion, a façade—to me that’s just such a horrifying thing. It’s also a reminder of how fragile these institutions are. We talked about All The President’s Men and that was a time when the institutions of the United States, despite being on the brink of a constitutional crisis, put the interests of the country and the truth first. Both parties—including the Republican Party, the party of President Nixon—provided a role that went beyond simply partisan ends. And now it seems increasingly that the institutions that are supposed to hold politicians and officials to account are under siege. So, we’re not in the same dire situation as that described in The Art of Political Murder , but you can see the seeds of what happens when the institutions that are set up to help the police and investigate aren’t able to do their jobs because they are, for various reasons, undermined. While working on the killings of the Osage Indians, I became acutely aware of this. There was a tremendous lawlessness in the United States back in the 1920s which I was unaware of until I really got into the research—I had no idea how lawless America was, and how corrupt so many of the legal institutions were. So many of these crimes were covered up because of prejudice and because there just wasn’t a system of law. We often—at least, I’m speaking for the United States—think of ourselves as kind of exceptional, and that what’s happening in Guatemala in The Art of Political Murder can’t happen here. But it happened to a great extent in the towns in Oklahoma that I wrote about, where these crimes were covered up and fake narratives were being created, a tissue of lies, or just silence. The Art of Political Murder has a particular resonance today. Solving a crime, and writing about crime, always involves an arranging of facts into some sort of logical design. Yet it’s possible for criminals, especially those who wield power and control instruments of communication, to construct a narrative that is an elaborate deception: that makes people think there is order when there is not. And so, it’s interesting that Goldman, who was a novelist, is so thorough in his reporting and picking apart these devilish fictions. What I like about his reporting, going back to some of your other questions, is that he allows for doubt to creep into his own narrative. I think that’s very important in reporting. There’s a tendency to want to obliterate doubt. I think too many writers want to create a perfect narrative or perfect clarity or attribute a simplistic motive or be reductive; it’s like they almost don’t trust the reader to handle uncertainty. And I bristle at that. What makes true crime interesting is that murkiness because that’s what makes it true. It doesn’t always mean that the truth doesn’t exist—I’m a big believer that the truth does exist, but getting at the truth can be difficult. It can be obscured. If it’s an historical case, we might not know everything; trails of evidence might have been lost. Unless there were 27 cameras focused on the crime, reconstructing the truth can be very difficult. And so one of the things I took away from reading this book was how Goldman pursues every line of inquiry but still allows for the murk. Yes. One of the things, again, with Killers of the Flower Moon , is that this true crime book is told through three narrators. It gets back to our question of investigators because we’re all investigators in our own way. An investigator doesn’t always wear a deerstalker cap. And so, the first chronicle is told from the point of view of Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose family is being serially murdered. She is trying to make sense of this incredibly sinister conspiracy. And then in the second chronicle, you have the more traditional investigator, Tom White. And then in the last chronicle you have my role as the historian or reporter or whatever you want to call me, coming in to try to look back and make sense of the gaps in the narrative. A deeper sense of what happened only emerges over time, with different perspectives, and even then the picture is not complete. “The horror in many cases is the unknowability… the most terrifying thing is when Sherlock Holmes can’t put it all back together again” Indeed, when I was doing the research, one of the things that I discovered early on was that there was going to be a number of unsolved crimes and thus unknowables. So, there were different ways to deal with that. You could try to minimise them, but I think that’s really—going back to Goldman—not going to bring you to the truth or the reality. Instead, you could make that unknowability part of the very fabric of the story—which is that we all have partial information. Facts elude us. And going back to what you were saying, one of the things that struck me in doing the research for the book was that I had always thought of crime stories as the horror of what you know. But in writing The Killers of the Flower Moon there were so many unsolved cases—cases for which there is still no accounting and in which the evidence has dried up or disappeared. The horror in many cases is the unknowability. To me that was very scary because that gets, again, at the very question of what we’re driving at in these detective stories, trying to impose some order and meaning on the world. But what if the order isn’t perfect or complete? That is something I wrestle with, because, in some ways, the most terrifying thing is when Sherlock Holmes can’t put it all back together again."